Wednesday, June 17, 2015

The Second Coming? Nah.

he (Saruman) wanted the Ruling Ring and was prepared to use force on whomever necessary to get it. But just as with Denethor, pride was the primary evil at work.
Those who will not receive mercy when it is offered are truly in dire straits. Mercy and redemption both were offered Saruman, but it would have meant casting aside his arrogance, ditching his hard-won ‘power,’ abandoning his machines and his tower, the symbols of that power. He simply could not admit that he had been wrong and that he ws now caught without any other way out.

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Belmont club wonders if society has gone over the cliff into madness, where the weird and the sociopaths are now the norm, where reality is denied, and where the twitter mob will attack you if you disagree.

One of the ways that technology has modified this age-old phenomenon is the role played by Internet, and in particular social media sites like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the blogs. Almost every modern affinity group, including the Syrian rebel factions, have their own social media platforms. That’s how they recruit, raise funds, issue orders and spread their meme. Craziness and affinity groups are positively correlated: the louder the uproar in Bedlam, the more people gather into knots of affinity groups to ensure their survival.

So turn off the TV, search out the garage for useful things like tools and go buy your friends a drink. You’ll need them. The friends that is. Maybe the drink too.

I feel doctors and medical personnel will be on the front line in this.
When I was a medical student 45 years ago, one professor tried to fail me in OB for not assisting with abortions. What saved me was that I was a known Catholic, and the Civil rights bill of 1964.

Section 703 (a) made it unlawful for an employer to "fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions or privileges or employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

With Obamacare, this might no longer be true for doctors; like the dilemma that one of my non Christian friends faced in 1970, they will merely insist that our religion "allows" abortions etc. and we will either have to go along with it, or lose our job .

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MarkMallet defends the Pope from his liberal and his conservative critics and warns to read what was actually said, and not to believe the press spin

On the Left, there has been much wishful thinking about how the former Cardinal Bergoglio is really a man of progressive sympathies, while on the Right, there is a deep suspicion that the first Jesuit pope is basically a “liberation theologian” who is not a particular fan of capitalism and may in fact be a sneak commie symp. Much of what the pope is said to have said turns out to be either a mistranslation or completely imaginary, the result of having reporters either ignorant of Catholicism or openly hostile to it reporting or commenting on the pope and the Church. So who is he? To quote the old joke, “Is the Pope Catholic?” You bet he is. To look at him any other way is simply wrong.

I plead guity. And I should know better, because I have lived and worked most of my life either in poor areas of the USA or outside the US...the Pope is talking about the realities in the third world, not the way things are (or used to be) done in the more honest USA....
sigh.-